


it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah

by red_carnations



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Atheism, Blasphemy, Character Study, Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Religion, Religious Fanaticism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24154987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/red_carnations/pseuds/red_carnations
Summary: Religion in the Grishaverse, and its impacts upon the lives of six people.
Kudos: 18





	it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah

_i._

Inej grows up on stories of the Saints. She hears countless tales around countless campfires every time they stop for the night, and by the time she’s ten years old, she can tell all of those stories by heart.

The Suli have no churches. How can they, when they never stay in one place long enough to build them? Instead, Inej is taught that any place can be holy, any place can receive her prayers. The Saints do not reside in painted buildings, nor even the bones Ravkans love to carry as talismans. Inej does not need books or candles or altars - only words, and faith.

“The Saints are always with you,” her father tells her when she’s just learning to sound out their names, crouching down to look her in the eye. “And they will always hear you, even if they do not seem to reply.”

So she prays when the slavers take her from her bed, prays when they stuff her in the hold of a ship full of other terrified children, prays when the beautiful woman rips her blouse and pulls up her skirt.

The Saints do nothing. It seems they have no miracles for her.

She still whispers their names in the dark, though, when she has nothing else to cling to. If she doesn’t, she fears that one day she will wake up and her old life will have been nothing but a dream. The Menagerie cannot be all there is for her.

_But how can they see me and not help me?_ a voice says in her mind on one of the worst nights. She’s curled up on the floor of her room, not feeling the plush purple carpeting against her skin. She can’t even feel the aching pain in her limbs anymore; it is as if she has been hollowed out and the shell of her body turned to marble. _If they were truly merciful, they would have killed me by now._

But, as she tells herself time and time again, the Saints really are watching over her. After all, they send her Kaz Brekker.

Kaz is an unusual instrument of divine power. He’s cold and cruel, and doesn’t even believe. Unlike her, he doesn’t look twice at the gaudy, lacquered jackal masks they see in shop windows as they walk through the tangled, smoky streets of Ketterdam, holy symbols given out like party favors.

Inej, though - those masks haunt her for days afterward, creeping in behind her eyes to whisper accusations in her nightmares.

Once, when she’s foolish enough to tell Kaz that the Saints had sent him to her, he laughs in her face.

“If the Saints existed, they wouldn’t allow me to wake up still breathing,” he says, his half-smirk not hiding the way it looks like he’s baring his teeth. “Much less send me to rescue one of their own.” His lips twist, razor-sharp. “I have to admit, I thought you were smarter than that, wraith.”

In that moment, she’s fairly sure she hates him. Every time she thinks she might be able to forgive his words, he heaps another offense on top of the pile.

But the incident almost flies completely from her mind when Kaz gives her the knife. “If you’re going to be in the Dregs, you’ll have to have some way of defending yourself,” he says when he presses the blade into her hands. The leather of his gloves is strangely warm against her skin; she had expected his hands to be cold as ice.

Inej clutches the knife tightly, her grip clumsy and unpracticed. From far away, it could’ve passed for a kitchen blade: a slender, undecorated wooden handle with a sharp piece of steel at the end. But when she looks closer, she can see it’s too heavy, too well-made, with an edge so keen that when she accidentally rests the ball of her thumb against it, a drop of blood wells up almost instantaneously.

“I’ll teach you how to use it,” Kaz promises. His dark eyes shine with a slightly crazed fervor, and his mouth curves up in a crooked smile that sends a shiver down her spine. “The Black Tips won’t know what hit them.”

Inej looks at him, and wishes with all her heart that she could be this dangerous, deadly girl he sees when he looks at her. And at the same time wishes that he didn’t see that girl at all, so it would be that much easier not to become her.

_Saints protect me_ , she thinks, and then, _no. No one else can protect me now, not here. The Saints will just have to guide my hands_.

She practices with the knife every day, and, in a moment of mingled conviction and contrariness, names it Sankt Petyr.

_ii._

One of Wylan’s earliest memories is of praying with his mother. She wears a stained white kerchief around her red-gold curls to keep them out of her face, kneeling on the floor of their drawing room and scrubbing the wooden boards with a rag dipped in soapy water. 

Wylan tries, clumsily, to imitate her. Marya places one callused hand over his, helping him move the sodden rag back and forth, and throws her head back and laughs when he brushes his hair out of his eyes and leaves a streak of soap across his forehead. She has forgotten to turn down one side of her collar.

His father never prays alongside them. Why should he? Every hour spent at work is a hymn to Ghezen, and Jan Van Eck is a businessman. He tithes to the church, of course, but he has quite enough to do without spending time on hands and knees scouring the floor of his own house. His prayers can be done behind the door of his office.

Or at least, that’s what his governess tells him when he asks. His father never weighs in on the subject.

Soon after, Wylan is thrust into an entirely different kind of work, with a number of tutors who never seem to stick around for long. At first, he thinks perhaps it’s because they all realize they’ve been asking him to do the impossible by making words out of the strange scribbles on the pages. 

This is before he knows better. Before the look in his father’s eyes turns from confusion to disappointment to anger.

The numbers are different; he likes them, likes how when the world is reduced to equations and formulae he doesn’t have to think about how _complicated_ everything is until he puts down his pen. There’s his flute, and the paints, which he practices both because he really does enjoy them and because they remind him of his mother after she dies. He even likes Fjerdan because of how the words feel rolling off his tongue - though as always, a choking, uncontrollable panic rises in his chest whenever he sees them written out on a page. 

It’s all work, all prayer, and yet somehow none of it is enough.

If sums were all one needed to be a businessman, Wylan would soon be the finest one in Ketterdam, perhaps in all of Kerch. But they’re not, and Wylan’s father makes sure he knows it. So, of course, it’s only a matter of time before Jan Van Eck takes steps to try and recover from his failure.

“Ghezen is merciful,” he says one night at dinner. “He gives second chances to those who have served him faithfully.”

Wylan examines the patterns in the grain of the table. There’s a peculiar set of looping whorls in one board that look rather like a row of fingerprints. 

Alys is not what one would call a traditional Kerch housewife. This is not for lack of trying, of course; right away, Wylan can tell her parents have done their best work on her. But though she constantly asks him what his father likes most and how she can best fulfill her role as the second Mrs. Van Eck, her personality is fundamentally unsuited to the Kerch standard of propriety.

“I want to be a good wife to him,” she confides the first time they meet, her white hands clasped in the lap of her blue silk dress and twisting the fabric in excitement. “He’s said he’ll buy me more birds, and more dresses, and a puppy!”

“I’m sure he will,” Wylan says, glancing around at the numerous little birds in their beautifully carved cages that already surround her. All are brightly colored and twittering excitedly - rather like Alys herself. “My father is very generous.”

She beams. “And very rich.”

Alys approaches prayer with the same good-natured haplessness as she does everything else. Every time, she insists on wearing her finest gowns, and cries whenever anything happens to them. More than once, Wylan catches her singing as she scrubs. More than once, he almost considers joining her.

“I like music more than cleaning,” she says on one sunny afternoon. She peers down at her embroidery hoop, her pale, delicate fingers tugging her needle through the circle of stiff white fabric. “Cleaning makes my hands hurt.”

_It’s supposed to_ , Wylan almost says. _Pain is the best tribute to Ghezen_.

Instead he smiles, offers to accompany her on the flute, and does not think about how much the voice in his head sounds like his father’s.

Jan Van Eck also does not press Alys on the point of frequent prayer. He gives her an indulgent smile that Wylan cannot recall him giving to anyone since Marya, and promises to buy her more pretty things.

_iii._

There is an ash tree planted at the center of Matthias’s village. They are too poor to go to the capital for _Hringk_ _ä_ _lla_ and buy the beautiful wreaths some tradesmen make, so when the time comes for the festival, the people make do with hanging one of its boughs above their door.

Matthias’s parents teach him prayers to say before the ash on every holy day, what blessings to use every time he fells a tree, the meaning of each festival they celebrate, how when they die, their bodies will take root in the earth and return to Djel. When his little sister arrives, he helps teach her, too, though she can’t pronounce most of the words for a good few years.

There are a lot of festivals in Fjerda. _Roennigsdjel_ lasts for a week, beginning with a dance by the maidens of the village, and everyone eats as much as the village women can cook. Matthias and his friends gorge themselves on elk, and one year they eat so much they all get sick.

Hringkälla is his favorite, though. “It’s meant to be a solemn time,” his father tells him, when he’s old enough to understand. “To mark the initiation of the new _dr_ _üs_ _kelle_ and remind Fjerdans that Djel’s hopes rest on their shoulders.” 

But in their village, it’s mostly a party - they eat pepper cookies and drink burning liquor and dance in the streets, and all the girls wear silver ribbons in their hair. 

It’s only as the hour nears midnight that the villagers grow quiet, and one by one, they form a line to place candles around the ash. Each one is an offering to Djel, so that he may hear their voices and keep Fjerda safe.

But Djel cannot protect them from the witches, the monsters who live in human skin. Matthias’s village burns, and the ash tree with it. 

He’s young, but he is strong, and big for his age, and the harsh, wild anger inside him will not permit him to be denied. The drüskelle take him eagerly. They make him a soldier, and Jarl Brum himself tells Matthias he has potential.

“You could be the finest drüskelle I have ever produced,” Brum says, laying a hand on Matthias’s shoulder.

The praise is sweet. The anger in him parts just enough to allow pride in with it.

(He will regret this later, will look back on this part of his life with shame and disgust. But for now, he believes that Djel has given him a mission. He believes he has been chosen.)

When he is initiated, Hringkälla suddenly has a new meaning for him. He creeps across the ice moat, the moonlight silvering the snow and water, and when he kneels by the ash, he thinks he hears a voice, whispering to him. It is wondrous and secret and sacred, and when he hears it, he thinks, _this. This is what Hringk_ _älla is about._

He rises as one of Djel’s holy warriors, among family for the first time in years.

And then on his first assignment, it all goes awry. The _drüsje_ , the Grisha, the girl - every part of her is wrong. She is ungodly and lewd and has no modesty at all. She is nothing like what Matthias has been told women should be.

But worse, she is charming and funny and keeps him going through the long days they spend struggling over the cold, barren land. Every day he spends with her, it becomes harder not to think of her as human.

He is weak, he knows it. She is the weakness in him.

_Or_ , a small voice whispers inside him, _is she my strength?_

When the Kerch take him and throw him in Hellgate (a word he only learns a month into his stay), he has no doubt anymore.

There are no ash trees in Hellgate. Almost none of the prisoners speak even a little Fjerdan, and none at all will pray with him. He doesn’t mind this; the criminals around him are not people he would want beside him when he speaks to Djel. Still, he has rarely felt so alone.

_Please,_ he thinks in his cell at night, straining to hear the sound of the waves crashing against the shore of the island. _Take me out of this place. I have done nothing wrong; I have only ever tried to follow your will. My only crime was trusting her._

He prays, and he prays, and salvation does not come. He murders animals in front of a roaring crowd for better food and a chance to be alone with his thoughts and his anger. He learns rough Kerch from the other prisoners, mostly against his will.

Eventually, he prays only that he should live long enough to kill her.

_iv._

When he’s about five years old, Jesper’s mother tells him there’s life in everything. “Listen to the earth,” she says in his ear, her breath tickling his skin. “If you listen hard enough, you can hear the spirits of the world around you.”

They’re sitting on the bare earth of his father’s farm. Jesper’s mother has her arms around him, holding him so close he can feel her heartbeat and the warmth of her skin. It’s easy to hear life when he’s with her, so brimming with energy and laughter and love. During some of the long, hot days he spends running unsupervised through the fields or the woods around their home, he makes fallen leaves dance in the air and pretends they’re spirits of wind.

Their home is rural enough that they rarely go into town. Jesper always begs to come along, and sometimes, his mother indulges him. “Don’t go where I can’t see you,” she tells him before every visit, crouching on the floor beside him.

Jesper promises, and promptly forgets the second he spots the first flash of bright color.

Often these trips happen on festival days. The Zemeni are a joyful people, and they have a celebration for almost everything: harvests, the changing seasons, death, birth, coming of age. There’s dancing and storytelling and sometimes even fireworks, and Jesper always begs his mother to stay just a little longer so they can watch.

“Alright,” she says each time with a smile. “But just this once.”

His mother does not hold to many of the rituals he sees performed in town. Indeed, neither of his parents pray or light candles and incense or do anything much besides murmur common religious phrases absentmindedly while doing chores around the house.

He learns Aditi’s only true creed when she teaches him to shoot out in the woods. She lays a steady hand on his shoulder and helps him keep the gun straight, keeping him at it until he can feel his target and trace the path of each shot before he fires it. 

“We’ve been given so many gifts, Jesper,” she says, squeezing his arm with her warm hand. Her dark eyes are bright and full of pride. “Be thankful. Treat each day as a blessing.”

The other thing Aditi does is tells him stories every night when she tucks him into bed. Stories about brave young girls and monsters who are more human than humans and spirits who quarrel and rejoice and bless _zowa_ with their power.

He loves the stories, every one. For a while, he even believes them.

His father talks of spirits, too, sometimes; Kaelish ones, who dwell in the secret places of the Wandering Isle. There are old songs about them Colm sings for Jesper and Aditi on late nights. These spirits are not the ones from Aditi’s stories, who glory in life and creation, but cold, otherworldly beings who delight only in playing cruel tricks on humans with their unnatural power.

When Jesper’s older, he understands the reason why Colm told those stories so rarely. Even Kaelish legend and superstition is laced through with fear and distrust of zowa.

With Aditi’s death, the stories stop. His father’s songs come even more rarely. And Jesper starts to hide what he is.

“Those things you can do - they’re dangerous,” Colm tells him. “I won’t see you hurt, not like her.”

Jesper nods, and puts the word _zowa_ out of his mind.

He flits all around the country in the years after his mother’s death, trying to find something into which he can pour all the excess energy inside him. He stays close to home at first, for his father’s sake, but when he gets in his first shootout with a group of men looking to carry off their crop, something in him sings at the sound and the way it makes his blood race.

“I want to get out, see the world,” Jesper tells Colm afterward. He holds up a revolver and tries to grin, to turn it into a joke. “Shoot some things.”

His father swallows, and nods, and lets him go.

The gunsmith’s town is much larger than the one nearest the farm. Its people are more and different from those he’d known, which is how Jesper likes it. The more people there are, after all, the more you can learn from them. 

Some keep his mother’s spirits, while others put their faith in totems, charms, or gods whose names he’s never heard. A few follow the Ravkan Saints, and Jesper enjoys learning the legends of their miracles almost as much as he likes the days he spends in the workshop, coming up with newer and crazier designs.

He doesn’t believe any of it, of course. It’s just something else to pass the time.

_v._

Nina dislikes her life greatly before she comes to the Little Palace. The orphanage is small and cramped and there is never enough to go around. Every Sunday, the children are bundled off to church, where they listen to a priest drone on for what feels like hours while incense burns and makes her eyes itch.

She’s not fond of churches. They are far too solemn for her taste, and there’s never anything to eat.

So when it’s discovered what she can do, her new life comes as a profound relief. Instead of stories about miracles and martyrs, Nina learns Grisha theory, _odinakovost_ and _etovost_ , the secret inner workings of the human body and what she can do to them.

Here, she excels, and her red _kefta_ fits her perfectly.

The Little Palace teaches the Grisha of Ravka’s Saints, but always as an afterthought. They are practitioners of the Small Science, not witches or priests; the Darkling and his soldiers leave the faith to the Apparat.

When Nina does think of Saints, she mostly thinks of Zoya Nazyalensky. Zoya has all the beauty and power of a Saint, as well as the same slightly alien aspect to her: a haughty, ethereal coldness that sets her apart. Perhaps she is simply too beautiful, too powerful, to belong with the rest of them. Nina certainly thinks so. She would rather look at Zoya than any faded holy pictures.

Oddly, she is far more fascinated by the religion of Fjerda than that of her own country. What on earth drives men to worship a tree? Especially when power, _true_ power, exists all around them, and the Fjerdans can do nothing but try to extinguish it. She reads countless books, learns the language, the culture, the history, and _still_ does not understand.

And then there is the Sun Summoner, and the war. Nina and the other students stay at the Little Palace for a time before Alina Starkov sends them off to Keramzin, and Nina does not have to be a Corporalki to feel the fear in the air.

She lies awake at night wondering what is happening outside, if they will all die tomorrow, and for the first time, she understands why people pray.

She’s sixteen when the war ends, suddenly. King Nikolai is crowned ( _Sobachka_ , they’d called him at the Little Palace, but he does not seem so much a puppy now), and the students are recalled to see what can be done with them.

“Too young,” Zoya says at once when Nina comes before the Grisha Triumvirate. She’s turned even colder since the start of the war, if such a thing is possible, her eyes sharp and merciless. “Too inexperienced. She needs more training before I even consider putting her in the field. For now, she’s useless to me.”

Nina’s heart hammers so loudly it drowns almost all else. To her horror, she feels tears beginning to well in her eyes; as she tries to blink them away, Genya Safin sighs loudly.

“We can’t afford to be picky, Zoya,” Genya says. “From what I’ve heard, she’s bright, capable, and has an excellent gift for languages. You’ll need that, where you’re going.”

Zoya sniffs. “I’m sure we have plenty of polyglots who aren’t idiot sixteen-year-olds.”

“Not like her,” Genya insists. “Besides, it’s never a bad thing to have a Corporalki on a mission like yours.”

Zoya glares, Nina holds her breath, and Genya stands firm. Finally, Zoya turns away with an irritated huff, folding her arms and looking down at Nina contemptuously. “Don’t make me regret this,” she says.

Her eyes are full of cold fire, and Nina thinks of painted Saints. “I won’t.”

When she first sees the _drüskelle_ boy at the campfire, with his golden hair and ice-blue eyes, the image of a warrior Saint flashes again through her mind. She could swear she’s seen him in a church painting somewhere; the thought almost distracts her from the fact that he would gladly kill her if he knew what she was.

As it turns out, the universe sees fit to remind her of this mere seconds later. The drüskelle bind her hands and take her to await trial before their god.

Mocking the drüskelle boy serves as one of the only things keeping Nina going during the weeks they spend together. He’s absurdly easy to provoke, and despite everything, she’s still curious.

“Why do Fjerdans think a tree god chose you to be the saviors of the world?” she asks him one day, when the glare of the sun on the ice threatens to drive her insane.

He scowls at her. “Why wouldn’t he?”

She laughs. The sound has jagged edges. “Because you think you have to murder the innocent to gain his favor.”

Still, she sometimes envies his faith.

_vi._

All of the people in Kaz’s town can quote the Book of Ghezen from memory. Every day, when Kaz’s father works in the fields, he goes with a smile and a verse about the value of hard work and industry.

He comes back exhausted, and every day his hair seems grayer and his face more lined, but he never says a bitter word.

“Ghezen puts men on the earth to labor and toil,” he tells his sons as they sit on the floor of their little house, as close to the hearth as they can manage without catching their clothing on fire. “To complain about your lot is to think yourself wiser than he is.”

“But why does Ghezen make some men merchants who don’t have to break their backs in a field all day, and others like us?” Jordie complains when their father is out of earshot.

Kaz chews his lip. He doesn’t know the answer; somehow, the closest the Book of Ghezen comes to saying why is to say that all men can prosper if they devote enough time to their god.

Once a week, one of the wealthier traders appears in the auction house to preach. These days are some of the only ones Kaz’s father takes off work on the farm. The three of them put on their least worn clothes and listen to the man speak the holy word from the auction block.

To Kaz, it seems to mostly be the same things over and over, but his father and Jordie listen, so Kaz tries to sit up straight and pay attention.

Then their father dies. Kaz barely hears the words their neighbors say to comfort, transfixed by the body crushed beneath the plow - it does not look like a person at all, but at the same time he cannot deny that it is.

He does not see how their father can be in a better place now when he is so indisputably _there_.

No sooner have they buried their father than rich men swoop down like vultures, all wanting money to cover debts their father owed or to snatch up the land from Jordie, now the man of the family. Their tiny house feels even more cramped and dirty compared to the men in their neat black suits.

Jordie doesn’t take much convincing to sell the farm. He greets Kaz late one night, triumphant in his ability to negotiate what he considers an excellent bargain.

“I’ll make us a fortune in Ketterdam,” he vows. “Ghezen will smile on us.”

And for a time, it almost feels as if he’s right. Kaz takes to Ketterdam immediately, with all its smoke and spectacle, and Jordie finally - _finally_ \- manages to find a job. They drink hot chocolate and buy new clothes and walk together alongside the canals, hand in hand.

Kaz doesn’t know when he stops believing in gods. Between living on the streets, nearly dying from the plague, and his struggle to survive after crawling out of the canal, he’s a little too busy to spend much time pondering theology. Maybe it’s during those weeks he spends living in dark alleyways, some feral creature inside him trying to claw its way through his chest. Maybe it’s when he wakes surrounded by stiff white bodies on Reaper’s Barge.

Or maybe he stops believing when he first lays eyes on the corpse of his father and just doesn’t realize it until he’s roaming the streets of Ketterdam alone, the need for revenge burning a hole in his heart.

The merchers claim their prosperity is a tribute to Ghezen. Well, Kaz can build his own altar to their cruel god, dressed in the uniform of a priest.

“The Saints are dead, wraith,” he spits at Inej one day, gloved hand tight on the head of his cane. He’s been annoyed with her for hours, but all it took was one of her disapproving looks and pious sayings for the ugly words to spill over.

“The Saints are martyred, Kaz,” Inej replies. There is no anger in her voice, only cold judgement, which he finds far more irritating. “And death is a gateway, not a wall.”

“Spare me your proverbs.”

Her mouth tightens. “Proverbs don’t become proverbs because they’re false.”

She needles him this way often, and the worst part is that she’s not doing it to be unkind. Despite all that has happened to her, she truly believes her Saints watch over her, and wants him to believe the same.

He doesn’t want her prayers. Whatever will happen when he dies, he’s done too much for the words of a little Suli girl to wash it out.

Then again, if the land of the living is anything to go by, perhaps whatever awaits will welcome him with open arms.

**Author's Note:**

> Leigh Bardugo gives us very little information regarding religions in places other than Ravka and Fjerda, so I had free rein to play around with worldbuilding. Hopefully I did an okay job.


End file.
